About this site
What the register is
Medioevo Italiano enters medieval Italy one surviving thing at a time: a building, an archive, a practice, each with its comune where it has one and its century where the record supports one.
Every entry is one surviving thing, located and dated, with what it proves.
The site is written in English. Italian words appear where they are the right word — comune, giornata, sinopia, pecia — and are glossed the first time they are used.
What the register will not do
- It invents no date, attribution, provenance or document. Where the evidence stops, the entry stops.
- Where scholarship disagrees, the entry sets out the competing readings and does not choose. Castel del Monte is the clearest case, and it stays open.
- Approximate figures are marked approximate. The seventy towers of San Gimignano are a tradition about a crowded skyline, not a survey.
- Six of the sixteen entries carry no comune, because a technique has no address.
How to read it
The register holds every entry in one ruled table, with comune, century and what survives. The five sections hold the same entries grouped by subject. Nothing on the site is behind a dropdown.